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When it comes to USB 3 it has been living for a while in illumos-joyent, the base of SmartOS, before making it into illumos-gate.
The policy in OpenIndiana is to use vanilla illumos: contributions to illumos-gate are only accepted if they pass thorough testing, no early integration for testing happens there.
The list of improvements in illumos itself over the past 6 months is actually more substantial: maybe it should be added to the version notes.

Another important aspect is that there has been a lot of catching up in OpenIndiana: moving from 10+ software consolidations to one buid system took an insane amount of time (especially when contributors only work on OpenIndiana in their spare time) and is not visible to the end-user.

If you have a problem with the installation, please get in touch on IRC or the oi-dev ML.

Also there was an interest in getting the Phoronix Test Suite in the main OpenIndiana repository, so we could discuss off-list if you like.

Comment

Wat? I'm assuming you're talking about USB 3.0? Yes, storage is part of it. But it's about actually being able to connect USB 3 devices and use the USB 3 controllers. You know, basic hardware support for technology that's been around for 7+ years and is now on almost all modern systems that are shipping. The "use case" is that people want to actually use that hardware in their OS.

Comment

Wat? I'm assuming you're talking about USB 3.0? Yes, storage is part of it. But it's about actually being able to connect USB 3 devices and use the USB 3 controllers. You know, basic hardware support for technology that's been around for 7+ years and is now on almost all modern systems that are shipping. The "use case" is that people want to actually use that hardware in their OS.

For high-end storage systems, USB 3.0 is not necessarily really a priority

Comment

For high-end storage systems, USB 3.0 is not necessarily really a priority

If you're doing multiple regular backups (and I hope you are), USB 3.0 starts to look rather important because not all backups go over the network. Besides that, OpenIndiana isn't just run on high-end storage systems. And USB 3.0 support isn't just about the speed. Check the wiki. There's a lot of notes about having to use USB 2.0 ports instead of USB 3.0 ports (and the devices connected to them) because USB 3.0 wasn't supported. Without the support, the ports were non-functional. Some user scenarios might require the user to use many USB ports. Some devices (e.g. the ASUS ZenBook UX32VD) don't have any USB 2.0 ports - only USB 3.0. That will become more and more common with newer devices. And that's a good thing, since it's a backwards-compatible standard.

The simplest and most direct use case for USB 3.0 is that it's a ubiquitous port present on the majority of modern machines, and users shouldn't have to remember which ports on their device (if any) can actually be used by the operating system. We should never be questioning why we're supporting basic interfaces and transports in an operating system, because not supporting them gets in the way of many basic computing tasks, and blocks many other development tasks. Yes, it's probably not a life or death scenario. But there's no solid argument against USB 3.0 support - only discussions of resource allocations and timelines. And that's highly subjective in a community effort.

Was this everyone's priority? No. But it was certainly someone's priority, as the code was written.

Comment

My personal use is workstations and compute nodes for parallel scientific computing: each system has a mirrored root ZFS pool and a scratch space for simulations with either RAIDZor stripped ZFS pool with compression depending on the use (safe keeping or I/O speed). Also I use snapshots to backup datasets and I do a bit of visualization as well.
This is a setup I have used since OpenSolaris around 2008.
I migrated to Ubuntu at some point in 2011 but went back to ZFS & OpenIndiana due to an episode of dataset corruption. Almost 10 years of ZFS goodness, you get used to it.

Comment

If you're doing multiple regular backups (and I hope you are), USB 3.0 starts to look rather important because not all backups go over the network. Besides that, OpenIndiana isn't just run on high-end storage systems. And USB 3.0 support isn't just about the speed. Check the wiki. There's a lot of notes about having to use USB 2.0 ports instead of USB 3.0 ports (and the devices connected to them) because USB 3.0 wasn't supported. Without the support, the ports were non-functional. Some user scenarios might require the user to use many USB ports. Some devices (e.g. the ASUS ZenBook UX32VD) don't have any USB 2.0 ports - only USB 3.0. That will become more and more common with newer devices. And that's a good thing, since it's a backwards-compatible standard.

The simplest and most direct use case for USB 3.0 is that it's a ubiquitous port present on the majority of modern machines, and users shouldn't have to remember which ports on their device (if any) can actually be used by the operating system. We should never be questioning why we're supporting basic interfaces and transports in an operating system, because not supporting them gets in the way of many basic computing tasks, and blocks many other development tasks. Yes, it's probably not a life or death scenario. But there's no solid argument against USB 3.0 support - only discussions of resource allocations and timelines. And that's highly subjective in a community effort.

Was this everyone's priority? No. But it was certainly someone's priority, as the code was written.

I cannot disagree with this
If you are familiar with the illumos integration process, you know that upstreaming takes time: this is usually where priorities influence the timeline.